ad words??

[john p]

wondering who else uses ad words and how you rate it, my bills used to be £30 odd quid a month, which got me a few jobs, past three months its been nearer £90,with no increase in calls. starting to get disillusioned with it.

[bigdave]

ours went from 20 odd to thirty quid a month bills to 100 to 150 quid a month bills with no extra calls

 

i ended up setting a limit of 35 quid & it was met within the first 2 or 3 days so i ended up cancelling it as i was disilusioned with it aswell!!

 

but i thought it was really good to start with!!!

[scraggs]

I use it and although it can be costly it does get results, but quite often if it suddenly gets costly you need to bear in mind your competitors can be adding up your bill by clicking and using various methods to make it look not so supsicious.

I use tracking software to check where the clicks are coming from and how often, it flags up too many suspicous clicks

You need to keep a very tight reign on it otherwise it can be a very expensive way of advertising

[Theocus]

You can also (not trying to teach anyone to suck eggs here) set the location of your advertising to a geographic area. Use googles keyword finder to see how terms are searched and also remember that it is no longer just one word but can be a sentence, ie "looking for stump grinding in John o groats"! They should work but again depends on how you want to spend the money. Make it catchy and have a website that keeps people there and want to use you. (dont look at mine, its being changed!).

Use analytics and as Scraggs said, keep a track on the clicks, are they organic or coming from a regular ip address.

I spent £10 last month advertising only locally and got a good amount of work from it.

Its tricky, needs plenty of tweeking but can work well.

[HCR]

I'm thinking of getting rid of it, I've spent quite a bit on it recently and have no evidence of it doing much good. I've just paid a friend who's a web designer etc for a bit of SEO (search engine optimisation) which should in theory achieve similar results.